A Comprehensive Analysis of the New Domain&nbspAuthority

Moz's Domain Authority is requested over 1,000,000,000 times per year, it's referenced millions of times on the web, and it has become a veritable household name among search engine optimizers for a variety of use cases, from determining the success of a link building campaign to qualifying domains for purchase. With the launch of Moz's entirely new, improved, and much larger link index, we recognized the opportunity to revisit Domain Authority with the same rigor as we did keyword volume years ago (which ushered in the era of clickstream-modeled keyword data).

What follows is a rigorous treatment of the new Domain Authority metric. What I will not do in this piece is rehash the debate over whether Domain Authority matters or what its proper use cases are. I have and will address those at length in a later post. Rather, I intend to spend the following paragraphs addressing the new Domain Authority metric from multiple directions.

Correlations between DA and SERP rankings

The most important component of Domain Authority is how well it correlates with search results. But first, let's get the correlation-versus-causation objection out of the way: Domain Authority does not cause search rankings. It is not a ranking factor. Domain Authority predicts the likelihood that one domain will outrank another. That being said, its usefulness as a metric is tied in large part to this value. The stronger the correlation, the more valuable Domain Authority is for predicting rankings.

Methodology

Determining the "correlation" between a metric and SERP rankings has been accomplished in many different ways over the years. Should we compare against the "true first page," top 10, top 20, top 50 or top 100? How many SERPs do we need to collect in order for our results to be statistically significant? It's important that I outline the methodology for reproducibility and for any comments or concerns on the techniques used. For the purposes of this study, I chose to use the "true first page." This means that the SERPs were collected using only the keyword with no additional parameters. I chose to use this particular data set for a number of reasons:

The true first page is what most users experience, thus the predictive power of Domain Authority will be focused on what users see.

By not using any special parameters, we're likely to get Google's typical results.

By not extending beyond the true first page, we're likely to avoid manually penalized sites (which can impact the correlations with links.)

We did NOT use the same training set or training set size as we did for this correlation study. That is to say, we trained on the top 10 but are reporting correlations on the true first page. This prevents us from the potential of having a result overly biased towards our model.

I randomly selected 16,000 keywords from the United States keyword corpus for Keyword Explorer. I then collected the true first page for all of these keywords (completely different from those used in the training set.) I extracted the URLs but I also chose to remove duplicate domains (ie: if the same domain occurred, one after another.) For a length of time, Google used to cluster domains together in the SERPs under certain circumstances. It was easy to spot these clusters, as the second and later listings were indented. No such indentations are present any longer, but we can't be certain that Google never groups domains. If they do group domains, it would throw off the correlation because it's the grouping and not the traditional link-based algorithm doing the work.

I collected the Domain Authority (Moz), Citation Flow and Trust Flow (Majestic), and Domain Rank (Ahrefs) for each domain and calculated the mean Spearman correlation coefficient for each SERP. I then averaged the coefficients for each metric.

Outcome

Moz's new Domain Authority has the strongest correlations with SERPs of the competing strength-of-domain link-based metrics in the industry. The sign (-/+) has been inverted in the graph for readability, although the actual coefficients are negative (and should be).

Moz's Domain Authority scored a ~.12, or roughly 6% stronger than the next best competitor (Domain Rank by Ahrefs.) Domain Authority performed 35% better than CitationFlow and 18% better than TrustFlow. This isn't surprising, in that Domain Authority is trained to predict rankings while our competitor's strength-of-domain metrics are not. It shouldn't be taken as a negative that our competitors strength-of-domain metrics don't correlate as strongly as Moz's Domain Authority — rather, it's simply exemplary of the intrinsic differences between the metrics. That being said, if you want a metric that best predicts rankings at the domain level, Domain Authority is that metric.

Note: At first blush, Domain Authority's improvements over the competition are, frankly, underwhelming. The truth is that we could quite easily increase the correlation further, but doing so would risk over-fitting and compromising a secondary goal of Domain Authority...

Handling link manipulation

Historically, Domain Authority has focused on only one single feature: maximizing the predictive capacity of the metric. All we wanted were the highest correlations. However, Domain Authority has become, for better or worse, synonymous with "domain value" in many sectors, such as among link buyers and domainers. Subsequently, as bizarre as it may sound, Domain Authority has itself been targeted for spam in order to bolster the score and sell at a higher price. While these crude link manipulation techniques didn't work so well in Google, they were sufficient to increase Domain Authority. We decided to rein that in.

Data sets

The first thing we did was compile a series off data sets that corresponded with industries we wished to impact, knowing that Domain Authority was regularly manipulated in these circles.

Random domains

Moz customers

Blog comment spam

Low-quality auction domains

Mid-quality auction domains

High-quality auction domains

Known link sellers

Known link buyers

Domainer network

Link network

While it would be my preference to release all the data sets, I've chosen not to in order to not "out" any website in particular. Instead, I opted to provide these data sets to a number of search engine marketers for validation. The only data set not offered for outside validation was Moz customers, for obvious reasons.

Methodology

For each of the above data sets, I collected both the old and new Domain Authority scores. This was conducted all on February 28th in order to have parity for all tests. I then calculated the relative difference between the old DA and new DA within each group. Finally, I compared the various data set results against one another to confirm that the model addresses the various methods of inflating Domain Authority.

Results

In the above graph, blue represents the Old Average Domain Authority for that data set and orange represents the New Average Domain Authority for that same data set. One immediately noticeable feature is that every category drops. Even random domains drops. This is a re-centering of the Domain Authority score and should cause no alarm to webmasters. There is, on average, a 6% reduction in Domain Authority for randomly selected domains from the web. Thus, if your Domain Authority drops a few points, you are well within the range of normal. Now, let's look at the various data sets individually.

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Random domains: -6.1%

Using the same methodology of finding random domains which we use for collecting comparative link statistics, I selected 1,000 domains, we were able to determine that there is, on average, a 6.1% drop in Domain Authority. It's important that webmasters recognize this, as the shift is likely to affect most sites and is nothing to worry about.

Moz customers: -7.4%

Of immediate interest to Moz is how our own customers perform in relation to the random set of domains. On average, the Domain Authority of Moz customers lowered by 7.4%. This is very close to the random set of URLs and indicates that most Moz customers are likely not using techniques to manipulate DA to any large degree.

Link buyers: -15.9%

Surprisingly, link buyers only lost 15.9% of their Domain Authority. In retrospect, this seems reasonable. First, we looked specifically at link buyers from blog networks, which aren't as spammy as many other techniques. Second, most of the sites paying for links are also optimizing their site's content, which means the sites do rank, sometimes quite well, in Google. Because Domain Authority trains against actual rankings, it's reasonable to expect that the link buyers data set would not be impacted as highly as other techniques because the neural network learns that some link buying patterns actually work.

Comment spammers: -34%

Here's where the fun starts. The neural network behind Domain Authority was able to drop comment spammers' average DA by 34%. I was particularly pleased with this one because of all the types of link manipulation addressed by Domain Authority, comment spam is, in my honest opinion, no better than vandalism. Hopefully this will have a positive impact on decreasing comment spam — every little bit counts.

Link sellers: -56%

I was actually quite surprised, at first, that link sellers on average dropped 56% in Domain Authority. I knew that link sellers often participated in link schemes (normally interlinking their own blog networks to build up DA) so that they can charge higher prices. However, it didn't occur to me that link sellers would be easier to pick out because they explicitly do not optimize their own sites beyond links. Subsequently, link sellers tend to have inflated, bogus link profiles and flimsy content, which means they tend to not rank in Google. If they don't rank, then the neural network behind Domain Authority is likely to pick up on the trend. It will be interesting to see how the market responds to such a dramatic change in Domain Authority.

High-quality auction domains: -61%

One of the features that I'm most proud of in regards to Domain Authority is that it effectively addressed link manipulation in order of our intuition regarding quality. I created three different data sets out of one larger data set (auction domains), where I used certain qualifiers like price, TLD, and archive.org status to label each domain as high-quality, mid-quality, and low-quality. In theory, if the neural network does its job correctly, we should see the high-quality domains impacted the least and the low-quality domains impacted the most. This is the exact pattern which was rendered by the new model. High-quality auction domains dropped an average of 61% in Domain Authority. That seems really high for "high-quality" auction domains, but even a cursory glance at the backlink profiles of domains that are up for sale in the $10K+ range shows clear link manipulation. The domainer industry, especially the domainer-for-SEO industry, is rife with spam.

Link network: -79%

There is one network on the web that troubles me more than any other. I won't name it, but it's particularly pernicious because the sites in this network all link to the top 1,000,000 sites on the web. If your site is in the top 1,000,000 on the web, you'll likely see hundreds of root linking domains from this network no matter which link index you look at (Moz, Majestic, or Ahrefs). You can imagine my delight to see that it drops roughly 79% in Domain Authority, and rightfully so, as the vast majority of these sites have been banned by Google.

Mid-quality auction domains: -95%

Continuing with the pattern regarding the quality of auction domains, you can see that "mid-quality" auction domains dropped nearly 95% in Domain Authority. This is huge. Bear in mind that these drastic drops are not combined with losses in correlation with SERPs; rather, the neural network is learning to distinguish between backlink profiles far more effectively, separating the wheat from the chaff.

Domainer networks: -97%

If you spend any time looking at dropped domains, you have probably come upon a domainer network where there are a series of sites enumerated and all linking to one another. For example, the first site might be sbt001.com, then sbt002.com, and so on and so forth for thousands of domains. While it's obvious for humans to look at this and see a pattern, Domain Authority needed to learn that these techniques do not correlate with rankings. The new Domain Authority does just that, dropping the domainer networks we analyzed on average by 97%.

Low-quality auction domains: -98%

Finally, the worst offenders — low-quality auction domains — dropped 98% on average. Domain Authority just can't be fooled in the way it has in the past. You have to acquire good links in the right proportions (in accordance with a natural model and sites that already rank) if you wish to have a strong Domain Authority score.

What does this mean?

For most webmasters, this means very little. Your Domain Authority might drop a little bit, but so will your competitors'. For search engine optimizers, especially consultants and agencies, it means quite a bit. The inventories of known link sellers will probably diminish dramatically overnight. High DA links will become far more rare. The same is true of those trying to construct private blog networks (PBNs). Of course, Domain Authority doesn't cause rankings so it won't impact your current rank, but it should give consultants and agencies a much smarter metric for assessing quality.

What are the best use cases for DA?

Compare changes in your Domain Authority with your competitors. If you drop significantly more, or increase significantly more, it could indicate that there are important differences in your link profile.

Compare changes in your Domain Authority over time. The new Domain Authority will update historically as well, so you can track your DA. If your DA is decreasing over time, especially relative to your competitors, you probably need to get started on outreach.

Assess link quality when looking to acquire dropped or auction domains. Those looking to acquire dropped or auction domains now have a much more powerful tool in their hands for assessing quality. Of course, DA should not be the primary metric for assessing the quality of a link or a domain, but it certainly should be in every webmaster's toolkit.

What should we expect going forward?

We aren't going to rest. An important philosophical shift has taken place at Moz with regards to Domain Authority. In the past, we believed it was best to keep Domain Authority static, rarely updating the model, in order to give users an apples-to-apples comparison. Over time, though, this meant that Domain Authority would become less relevant. Given the rapidity with which Google updates its results and algorithms, the new Domain Authority will be far more agile as we give it new features, retrain it more frequently, and respond to algorithmic changes from Google. We hope you like it.

Be sure to join us on Thursday, March 14th at 10am PT at our upcoming webinar discussing strategies & use cases for the new Domain Authority:

I am Principal Search Scientist at Moz. I have 3 amazing daughters Claren, Aven and Ellis, an incomparable wife Morgan, and am a Christian, democrat nerd who often doesn't know when to shut his mouth :-)

Russ, the new Moz score update is a positive thing, it really is good for everyone of us to keep new benchmarks and improve our content optimisation. I have also noticed that Moz reduced DA just based on assumptions not on actual factors. I have never ever in my entire career participated in link selling. Our website pretty much maintained a MozTrust rank of 5 and 94% quality outbound links but suddenly loses DA just based on a random assumptions. Doesn't this sound misleading? Your new DA metric should stop calculating DA just based on assumptions.

The metric is too weak in correlating higher SERP's with DA and that is the reason why Google's JohnMu asked "What's the DA weather report say?"

Hopefully your team will check into the flaws on the new metric and correct the same before next update.

Thank you for your questions and concerns. First, there was a re-centering with this update. A randomly selected domain on the web will drop 6.1% in DA.

Did you check against your competitors to see if they dropped a similar amount? DA is a relative metric, so it is very common for sites in the same industry to rise and fall together.

However, regarding assumptions, we don't really make them (or at least not about ranking factors). The Neural Network was trained against SERPs and random pages from our link index that do not occur at all in our SERP collection. This means that the Neural Network learned what link patterns correlate with rankings and which do not. It is highly probably that your drop in DA is mostly related to the re-centering, but also that some of the links you have just really aren't contributing to your rank.

I second this 100%. My agency has a 12 year old domain. We've always ranked, we've always held domain authority, and suddenly with your new metric we drop from 40 to 25 with no traffic or core rank drop. We have no spam, have always followed the right strategies and have always had quality content, inbound traffic, followed the micromoment, etc. I for one call bluff on the accuracy of your new DA metric that is based on assumption and suggest it's revised as soon as possible. Christina, Founder, Savy Agency

Russ, A very through review of the new Moz score, it really is good that you are improving it as time does not stop still and like all good things on the web, the more successful it is the more it get's abused as you have pointed out with the examples of domain valuations based on DA.

I think users will quickly adapt to the new score and as all sites are impacted it will quickly be adapted to. Fingers crossed that my own sites come out better than before!

Most of the time i encourage quality updates but this update i cant take serious. It doesn't reflect the rankings in Google. After the update I see websites outperform other websites on domain authority, And these websites have a lot of spammy links. The DA doesn't reflect the real rankings at this moment. Maybe time to use ahrefs as a standard....

I appreciate your response, but as you can see from the study I provided above, Domain Authority performs better than Ahrefs' DR metric. Of course, domain level metrics have low correlations in general because page-level metrics matter a lot more than domains.

If there are specific examples of this for which you would like us to take a look, let me know. You can always tweet me at @rjonesx or email me at russ[at]moz[dot]com

I'm glad about this update, as the world's oldest sector was losing confidence in this metric. I hope that this change in the DA will help to have a more realistic reference of the domain authority. Although like Antonio Muñoz, I believe that the PA is almost more important in many cases.

I hope there aren't too many heart attacks with this actulization, even though I know more than one person who has to be crying a lot right now. XD

This is an extremely helpful analysis of the new Domain Authority algorithm. There is a lot of helpful information here as well as a solid explanation of the various elements and different factors that were taken into consideration in the revamping process. Great information!

I'm happy to hear about this new update from MOZ, as the world's most established division was losing trust in this measurement. I trust that this adjustment in the DOMAIN will have an increasingly sensible reference of the area specialist. I trust that the PA is practically increasingly critical as a rule.

At last, it will be more diligently for connection vendors to swell their DA so as to dupe and delude clients. That appears to be a positive to me.

Yes, the new update is likely responsible for those changes. On average, a random site should lose 6.1%, so randomness alone should have brought your 16 down to maybe a 14. The rest is the algo figuring out something about your links that don't predict positive rankings.

All the volatility you see today is likely due to the new Domain Authority. You will probably see a lot of sites get utterly deflated (62 to 9, for example) because the new DA actually detects manipulation that doesn't positively influence rankings.

Breaking news! On March 6, 2018, many places in the world have seen a sudden increase in hospitalization due to heart attacks. Especially among the so-called "shady SEO specialists". Authorities have still not identified the cause of this disturbing phenomenon. Stay tuned!;)

If there are many backlinks of a website, among them majority are good DA links if that website removes the low-quality (low DA) backlinks, will the DA of the website become better again (which has gone down after latest DA update)?

It looks like the new DA is dropping foreign websites. I blog in Dutch and have dropped to 16. Moz does not recognize my ranking keywords, because they are not English but Dutch. Is it possible to look into this? Because it is a bit frustrating after working this hard :)

Thanks for the question! First, you should check your competitors and see if theirs dropped similarly. If so, there really isn't much to be concerned about, as the whole market will shift relative to the change.

However, there are only a couple of ways in which a link profile gets devalued in the DA model. This would occur if the distribution of root linking domains strays from the natural distributions of high ranking sites relative to spam score of linking domains, link quality of linking domains, and popularity of linking domains.

I would spend some time examining those if you dropped more than your competitors.

I do not think you understood my question? I understand what you are saying. The domains linking to me are all low in spamscore and high in DA, with a few exceptions, which everyone has. I have a very low spamscore myself. But Moz is only looking at English, which means it does not recognize my keywords (which are all in Dutch). It might be true other Dutch blogs did drop in DA too (I did not have the possibility to check yet), but most English bloggers I know gained a lot. And they are also my competitors. So with this new DA English bloggers get a big advantage over foreign ones. So could you tell me why Moz only looks at English keywords?

Personally, I am struggling to get my head around the new DA somewhat. I've had some really great quality links back to my blog and my spam score is extremely low, yet I've dropped 3 points, while I've seen other blogs who are notorious for taking just about every sponsored post (with follow links) they can get their hands on - often simply copy and pasted content with no editing done whatsoever - go up by several points. Quite disheartening. I can only hope you're still ironing out the kinks.

Hi, thanks for your thoughts/questions. Because DA uses only inbound links, that a website includes sponsored posts won't affect its DA. I don't see us including outbound links at any time in the future, so I don't think much will change. However, your loss of 3 DA points sounds like it is probably close to the range of normal for the re-centering that occurred with this update (on average, every site loses over 6% of their DA)

Analyzing my website, both the Spanish version and the Portuguese version. In the Spanish version I have gone up 0.75% (I have gone from 40 to 43 DA) and in Portugal I have dropped 1 point. On the other hand, my competitors have dropped to 10 points.

This is not going to raise or lower positions, but if we can value in a more truthful the quality of a digital medium or blog (to NOT buy links).

'Google does not use MOZ's DA as a ranking factor. DA is more like a score that estimates how likely it is for a domain to outrank another.' Thank you for clearing that up.

However, the latest update might result in DA fluctuations of a website and if it becomes lower, it is plausible to state that the count of spammy or broken inbound links has risen gradually. And Google still considers backlinking as a ranking factor, so if the DA of your site has fallen, you should run a backlink analysis. Otherwise, sooner or later, your rankings will experience a fall.

Fantastic analysis and fantastic work on giving DA some revived usability! DA is not something I track closely for out site but it's about 3 points higher than when I last checked so I can assume we weren't heavily impacted. Interesting to see some competitors were really hit with a drop which sums up how I always thought they were doing things.

I did a couple DA checks from various domains ... and yes the changes are sometimes extremely high and sometimes almost nothing has changed like you described in your post. To me the new DA makes a lot of sense from what I have seen. Thanks!

Your site's spam score has nothing to do with its Domain Authority. We look at the spam scores of the sites linking to you, not your spam score. That being said, a drop from a 7 to a 3 is within the range of normal. I would focus on getting good, natural links to your site.

Love seeing that Domainer networks and Low-Quality Auction Domains are being factored with a drop in Domain Authority. Great improvements that continue to line up with Google's standards. Well done Moz!

It is the most genuine thing, we all should must understand it, before doing and any link building practice. Very genuine post. Loved to read it. Recommneded to others as well, if you want to understand the concept.

I believe that this is one of the most detailed analysis of domain authority. There is no doubt that too many people are running after links. People should focus on user experience rather than just links.

I'm pleased to know that random sites were down by 6%. One of my websites got from 47 to 42, which is kind of a red flag to finally start doing proper outreach. But I've seen another go from 20 to 26 :) Which is huge encouragement. Now I have a better idea about which strategies work better.

Thank you for the comprehensive explanation over the new DA, I feel like it clears most of the fog when it comes to confusion and insecurity.

Just a question - and I know that this can sound a bit elementary, but I never got around on finding an answer by myself - does plenty of new content (quality, well-researched, and well-written) with proper interlinking, eventually increases DA, or are we talking mostly about external signals? If the content starts to rank, and DA is a predictor to ranking in SERPS then it seems obvious. But let's assume, in theory, that some of the content is going to rank within the first 10, and most of the rest won't.

At the end of the day, my question is really about ranking, and not just DA in itself. Will plenty of quality content improve the website in the eyes of Google, or are we talking about separate pieces that will either rank or won't? And then the consequences of those quality pieces making traction by themselves by picking up links, reducing bounce rate, bringing a ton of social signals...

Thank you so much for sharing this much-awaited new Domain Authority detail and its comprehensive analysis.

It is indeed an interesting and serious thing to know about our DA and PA and also to compare the competition by using the Chrome extension.

It is really good to read your replies too to the queries in the comment box,

My main blog pvariel.com DA there is no change and it is the same as 37 but my other two websites DA went down by 4 and 3 each.

I have a small doubt about this new change. Will, it any way effect if we change the original publish date to the current date when we update the post. I have been doing this for almost a few months while updating my posts on my main web page.

In general I see a great improvement of this metric. We have our own metric DomainScore and would of course love if it would have been included in the Correlations with SERPs graph. Would that be possible?

I can say in my industry, this update has made it so DA reflects rankings much more accurately on the whole. I would love to see a similar change to PA so we can also accurately assess local rankings. For example, when it comes to businesses with multiple locations it seems PA may be an even more important metric than DA. Would that be accurate in your mind, Russ?

Thank you for your comments and questions. First, it is important to know that the Spam Score of your own site does not affect Domain Authority. Rather, it is the Spam Scores of the sites that link to yours which matter. For example, you have links from article and link directories that have high Spam Scores.

Secondly, it is worth comparing your site to your competitors. Did their scores drop a similar amount? If so, there is little to worry about.

Finally, the best way to increase your Domain Authority is simply to acquire links naturally, especially from sites that are likely to send traffic via that link (ie: what links were for in the first place!)

I would contact the seller for a refund. Auction domains are notorious for having inflated link counts due to people churn-and-burning domains. As you can see in the study above, auction domains lost between 61% and 98%

Our hope is that this new DA will help people just like yourself from being screwed by unscrupulous sellers.

There are a Some Point here that are very important, New Domain Authority (Domain Authority, Citation Flow and Trust Flow (Majestic), and Domain Rank) appreciating for providing the complete information to analysis New Domain Authority Algorithm.

Thanks for this thorough post on DA 2.0. This blog surely helped me and my team understand how DA works better than ever before. I just have one question here. Has the DA 2.0 been rolled out for all websites? Or is it going to take a while to hit everyone?

The reason I'm asking this is because even though I see several websites' DA change, there are a handful of domains whose authority is still the same.

Thanks for your comments! PA is definitely a stronger predictor of rankings. We will begin working in earnest on improving PA now and, hopefully, include internal link data alongside external link data to determine the new PA.

Interesting article which really gives us a better understanding of how Moz DA works. However when I check the link profile of some competitors who appear to have 2 times fewer links than me their DA is like 2, 3 points higher. Could it be explained by a better link profile?

Hi Russ! Never in our lives have we sold or bought a link, yet our DA dropped from 20 to 18. We struggle to keep our baby blog SEO optimised with the utmost respect to our audience, no matter the difficulties and we want so much to watch it grow. Could you please link to any resources we could study on ways to keep a healthier link profile and, eventually, increase our DA? Thank you in advance.

A 2 point drop is within the range of normal (most sites lost 6% or so as the model re-centered). I wonder why you are interested in increasing your Domain Authority? Do you sell links off your site and dropping below 20 makes your site less valuable to advertisers?

At any rate, if you want to improve your rankings in Google, create better content and do good outreach, especially to sites that are likely to send you traffic through the links you acquire. This is the most straightforward way to increase your rankings and, subsequently, your DA.

Hi again Russ. As I made clear right from the start, we neither sell nor buy links. Also, we create great content. However, a low DA hinders our SEO efforts. No matter how good and optimised content we produce, who's going to see it if we are never able to outrank our competitors for our keywords? As far as outreach is concerned, similarly, who's going to link back to a site with a low DA when they have the chance to link to one with higher DA in the same niche? Last but not least, a low DA eventually leads to less chances for meaningful collaborations (we are in the travel niche). So, although you keep saying that DA is just a relative metric etc, sadly, in the real world it has become yet another end in itself to pursue. Therefore, no, we don't and we won't sell links, but, yes, we want to increase our DA for so many other reasons. Thanks for your response.

Google uses its own proprietary metrics to judge the quality of a site. We have built Domain Authority to try and predict Google rankings at a domain level. Your site has a DA 7, most likely because you have very few root linking domains (9)

"Subsequently, link sellers tend to have inflated, bogus link profiles and flimsy content, which means they tend to not rank in Google. If they don't rank, then the neural network behind Domain Authority is likely to pick up on the trend."

Embarrsingly I didn't piece 2+2 together like you did here. So basically when people talk about sites having real traffic, they basically mean, "a fair chance the website receives organic clicks and thus visitors" which Google can infer not from CTR and GA or other "mysterious" sources of data which they deny using but simply, some sort of visivility and click through curve. It all makes sense now...

The new update came at a time when the Moz Domain Authority metric was under intense debate over its inability to filter out a few blackhat methods. Moz itself confirmed the same while teasing the launch of Domain Authority 2.0.

The new Domain Authority update boasts of its strongest correlations with SERPs and its ability to handle link manipulation.

The new Domain Authority metric is based on Moz’s improved machine-learning model. It now takes into consideration a number of new factors in determining the DA score of websites.

In This research. Most thing are agreeing. But something not agree. Which is how you guys will understand do follow links, but disavow by webmaster. How you also think about like that if my site drop domain authority 20. But the site majestic score 20 . But the site organic traffic million!. Of course Alexa 10k too!. So I believe many research need to do. Before make it live. But yeah, it is sure nice to know the private blogger, fraud linker , Someone hold site authority and block moz if they all affect. I already sent an email with some question too!.

also make some question. some site who have atleast 350k organic traffic!. why they take request to make a link with my site?. do you think they don't know seo! .if they don't know seo how they make 350k organic traffic? So I have to know all the questions answer. even their site better than moz organic traffic.

Moz must required update because 99% people doing it. lot of fraud, cheater, who are doing seo job without research and take money. from today it will stop. but must be right knowledge and sense. If moz showing a site 100 DA even. but site no quality. it also another challenge for moz! and what I asked few years ago to moz. moz can not say anything :D . Finally find out answer by moz. But something also required to correct.

It is certainly a hard balance - high correlation with SERPs vs trustworthy data for sites that don't rank at all. We moved towards the direction of impacting sites that don't rank at all because we were doing literally nothing about them in the past. Hopefully this new balance we have struck will be well received.

But come a new question. which is spyfu or semrush is guess organic traffic! Based on what keyword you ranked!. But if sermush never know what keyword I am ranking but do not get any click does not it mean the site don't have any quality ranking!.Thats why we use SERP tracker! I do the thesis. And I see it is far different with real google analytics data. So yeah its impossible to know reality. My site traffic 1% . And some keyword I ranked where atleast 500k organic traffic competitor similar position or behind me!. I have proven screenshot. Tell me one thing semrush always saying zero? But if I show my email how many inquiries every day I usually receive from anywhere in the world!. And 99% are talking about finding my site in search engine!. Then your score still incorrect. even tomorrow a very high quality company atleast with 6k semrush organic traffic company offer me some new opportunity. So how semrush will detect? also now a days bad bot we blocked too!.

if my site really worthless do you have the idea what I told you in the email? Million Semrush traffic site request me to link to their site how and why? Heheh. So the question comes after and after. they have atleast 100+ running employee too!. I hope you also think that. and correct it. Thanks

Thanks for these recommendations. I think it is normal for sellers and buyers to be penalized for carrying out this practice.

Fortunately, since I do not do any of them, my domunio has gone up one point (from 25 to 26 DA).

My question is in the comments of sparmers. If you comment an entry or article, give your opinion and in your name you indicate your website. Is this considered spam? I guess not, that's when in the description you bring something that has nothing to do with that article.

No, that is not comment spam. It is important to point out that the model doesn't explicitly target any type of spam, rather it has learned different patterns that correlate with lower rankings (ie: penalized or banned) and those patterns are reflected in a lower DA. You would have to do quite a bit of spam for this to be problematic.

Like I said in another post, in my domain (low competition nich) it's very easy to see the correlation between DA and access/display metrics. I always useDA as a base criteria to quickly evaluate different websites in a same nich.

Thank you very much for this information, now I understand a little bit more.Anyways, I'd like to ask you something because I'm kind of worried. Before the update, my DA for my 3 year old blog was 21 and now it's only 2, and the competition had almost no change. I've never done any black hat or bad SEO, just trying to post good content (posts with over 1000 words and quality). A couple of months ago I noticed backlinks from spammy websites on my Search Console. You know, chinese, russian or e-commerce sites that have nothing to do with my niche. Even when I go to those spammy websites I can't find the backlinks. I'm really confused. I read that nowadays Google is smarter and identifies those sites as spammy and those links don't have any value so you don't have to worry or even use the Disavow tool. Now, after this real drop on my Moz DA, i'm worried that my blog might have a penalization in the future or a decrease in the rankings. What do you think?

Your Domain Authority is now 21 from what I can see. However, your drop is probably related to the very unnatural graph of backlinks distributed by quality. You have a huge spike in links coming from DA 40-50. No doubt the neural network would have picked up on that bit.

It is hard to tell without knowing your site, and even then it would likely be a number of factors. Did you compare your drop to your competitors? It is possible that your industry as a whole saw larger drops across the board, which would be less cause for concern.

same in my case. 43 DROP to 26 . No sense! check out the site extorfx I know lot of bad comments links , negative seo links etc. but all disavow. But what if its already disavow by webmaster? But it is dofollow!. did you guys research it ?

Hi Kazi, I struggle with a similar problem. If you submitted a disavow file to Google then only Google can see it and take it under consideration. MOZ can't. Changes in this algorithm are pretty confusing but let's hope that at the end of the day will be beneficial for the whole industry.

We don't need to see the disavow to determine whether or not the site will rank with that particular link profile. Just like Google has learned to ignore some types of links, we have learned to ignore or devalue certain link patterns. Importantly, NONE OF THESE DEVALUATIONS OCCUR UNLESS IT INCREASES THE PREDICTIVE POWER OF DA. If enough sites with link profiles like yours disavowed their links and had rankings, then the neural network would learn to associate those link profiles with decent rankings. But that does not appear to be the case.

Russ, thanks for the response. I do agree on your view of re-centering and done extensive research on my industry and competitors and found that the DA drop is not due to re-centering as they haven't dropped a similar amount.

During my extensive research I also found out that domain authority now correlates to competitor Ahrefs domain rating which was updated on February. The same seems to have applied to my industry and competitor as I researched further. I hope this might be a serious flaw in the system. You might have obviously considered Domain Rating,TrustFlow and CitationFlow during Domain Authority update but Ahrefs domain rating seems to have applied at least some domains or industry.

Hope you ensure that domain authority remains as an independent SEO score that have less or minimal correlation to Ahrefs domain rating.

I need some of your help. Unfortunately, my website blog does not work. Before it was share blog. I had a WordPress blog and I shared the blog link to my main url/blog Somehow it's not available online. My question is if I create a new customize blog and import the old post, is there anything positive effect or negative? Or I have to create a new blog and a new post.

Great question! There are several ways DA gets updated, so let me address each...

DA changes because the link graph changes (updated every other day)

DA changes because we retrain the model (TBD)

DA changes because we change the variables (TBD)

DA changes because we change the model entirely (TBD)

We are probably looking at around 6 month intervals for #2 and #3 in that list and #4 probably won't happen for a very long time unless something better than neural networks is invented :-)

Finally, beating a competitor wont change your DA. The only thing that will change your DA are changes in the link graph. However, theoretically, your DA going up should correspond with some improvement in rankings.

I am extremely disappointed to your new DA update, my website DA was 22 to 10 , it was 9 year old domain. also i am not getting understand what is problem with you if blogger was earning money from high DA domains.

Dear Moz,

I think you don't know the affect of this update, in all over the world many bloggers and companies was getting earn from high DA domains. and keeping his /her family happy with blogging work. but from this stupid update many blogger, companies, employee now workless and their income is totally Z-E-R-O = 0 . now tell me what should they do ???.

Hi, I'm sorry that the update might cause you and your family financial distress. The role of DA is to predict rankings in Google, nothing more, nothing less. It doesn't cause your rankings to drop. However, if you sell links off your site based on its DA, then I could understand why you would lose revenue. Unfortunately, we also have to think about the webmasters who would buy links/posts from you or others based on bad information (inflated Domain Authority scores, for example). Think about the countless companies that have bought links from sites, only to see little or no benefit relative to the cost. We have to think about them too.

I want to add a reply. I already email in you gmail.! 92 DA site. but High spam score so what? if it is how Google do it. trillion bad linking done in google or facebook. and DA is higher. it must be high spam score. google or facebook don't have time to contact webmaster too. But they do simple solution and its work. So high spam score does not make any sense. high Spam score if something.then 92 with million bad comment site should be same trouble but its not!.

This is a good question. Imagine you knew to soccer teams were playing against one another. One team historically scores 5 goals a game and gives up 1. The other team historically scores 2 goals a game and gives up 3. You could create a metric called "goal differential" where the first time has a GD of 4 (5-1) and the second team has a GD of -1 (2-3). This metric would help you predict the outcome of their match - namely that team 1 should win. However, the GD metric you created didn't cause team 1 to win over team 2, it just predicted it. And sometimes that prediction is wrong.

The same is true with Domain Authority. We use links to predict how strong a domain is and, thus, how likely it is to rank in Google. It doesn't cause the domain to rank well, it just predicts that it will rank well.

Hi, my DA fell from 33 to 31 and no change in PA and also, my competitor's website's both PA and DA jumped from 16 to 27 and 24 to 30.Is it due to these new updates. what should I need to do now? Please suggest.

Thank you for your questions. PA has not been changed yet, so any fluctuations you see there are just the typical fluctuations caused by changes in the link graph.

Your drop of 2 points is well within the expected drop due to the re-centering of the model (which expects most sites to drop about 6%)

Your competitors' improvements are also likely due to the algorithm update. Because Domain Authority is relative and we are now able to devalue sites that have very unnatural link profiles, you can expect smaller sites with low DA that have not been cheating to see a nice increase.

Thank you for your response, but I don't believe this is the case. We don't really "penalize" sites, the algorithm just learns what link profile patterns are associated with rankings. Negative SEO will only affect DA insofar as it affects SERPs, which would be a GOOD thing. DA is supposed to mirror Google, both the good and the bad.

Actually, Google had these changes all along. Domain Authority just couldn't detect them. Domain Authority now does a better job of detecting link manipulation schemes THAT DO NOT improve rankings. If they improve rankings, then the Neural Network would actually INCREASE the DA. We do a much better job of "link accounting" than ever before!

Ultimately, it will be harder for link sellers to inflate their DA in order to defraud and mislead customers. That seems like a positive to me.